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With his celebrity interviews, political debates, and topical discussions, King was not just an enduring personality on the air. He also stood out for the curiosity to be brought to every interview, whether it was questioning the victim of assault known as “Central Park Jogger” or billionaire industrialist Ross Perot, who in 1992 rocked the presidential election by announcing his candidacy on the King show.
In its early years, “Larry King Live” was based in Washington, DC, which gave the show an air of gravity. Likewise King. He was the medium through which the Beltway bigwigs could reach their audiences, and they did, earning the show’s prestige as a place where things were done, where news was made.
King has conducted approximately 50,000 on-air interviews. In 1995, he chaired a Middle East Peace Summit with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It has welcomed everyone from the Dalai Lama to Elizabeth Taylor, from Mikhail Gorbachev to Barack Obama, Bill Gates to Lady Gaga.
Especially after her move to Los Angeles, her shows were often the focus of the latest celebrity news, including Paris Hilton talking about her time in prison in 2007 and Michael Jackson’s friends and family talking about her death in 2009.
King prided himself on never over-preparing for an interview. His non-confrontational style relaxed his guests and made him easily accessible to his audience.
“I don’t pretend to know everything,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press in 1995. “No,” What about Geneva or Cuba? “I ask,” Mr. President, what is it that you don’t like about this job? Or “What’s the biggest mistake you made? “It’s fascinating.
In an era when CNN, as the sole actor in cable news, was seen as politically neutral and King was the essence of his middle position, political figures and people at the center of controversy sought his show.
And he was known to receive guests who were notoriously elusive. Frank Sinatra, who rarely gave interviews and often lashed out at reporters, spoke to King in 1988 during what would be the singer’s last major television appearance. Sinatra was an old friend of King’s and acted on it.
“Why are you here?” King asks. Sinatra replies, “Because you asked me to come and I haven’t seen you for a long time to begin with, I thought we should get together and talk, just talk about a lot of things.”
King had never met Marlon Brando, who was even harder to get hold of and harder to interview, when the acting giant requested to appear on King’s show in 1994. The two hit it off so well that they ended their 90 minute conversation with a song and a kiss on the mouth, an image that was all over the media over the following weeks.
After a week-long gala marking his 25th birthday in June 2010, King abruptly announced he was stepping down from his show, telling viewers, “It’s time to hang up my nightly suspenders. Named as his successor in the timeslot: British journalist and TV personality Piers Morgan.
When King left in December, it was suspected that he had waited a bit too long to hang these suspenders. A former leader in cable TV news, it ranked third in its time slot with less than half the nightly viewership in its peak year, 1998, when “Larry King Live” drew 1.64 million. viewers.
His wide-eyed, normal-looking approach to interviews then felt outdated in an age of edgy, aggressive, or loaded questions from other hosts.
Meanwhile, occasional hiccups had made him seem disconnected, or worse. A prime example from 2007 showed King asking Jerry Seinfeld if he voluntarily left his sitcom or was canceled by his network, NBC.
“I was the first TV show, Larry,” Seinfeld replied with a flabbergasted look. “Do you know who I am?”
Always a workaholic, King would return to do specials for CNN a few months after completing his nightly chores.
He found a new kind of celebrity as a clear natural on Twitter when the platform appeared, gaining over 2 million followers who simultaneously mocked and loved him for his esoteric style.
“I have never been in a canoe. # Itsmy2cents, ”he said in a typical 2015 tweet.
His Twitter account was essentially a relaunch of a USA Today column he wrote over two decades full of unique and rambling thoughts. Norm Macdonald delivered a parody version of the column when he played King on “Saturday Night Live”, with straight lines like, “The more I think about it, the more I appreciate the equator.”
King was constantly parodied, often through old age jokes on animated late-night talk shows such as David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, often appearing with the latter to participate in the roasting himself.
King honestly came by his voracious but unadorned manner.
He was born Lawrence Harvey Zeiger in 1933, a son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who ran a bar and grill in Brooklyn. But after his father’s death, when Larry was a boy, he faced troubled, sometimes destitute youth.
A fan of radio stars like Arthur Godfrey and comedians Bob & Ray, King as an adult set his sights on a career in broadcasting. Knowing Miami was a good place to break into, he headed south in 1957 and landed a sweeping job at a tiny AM station. When a deejay abruptly quit, King was put on the air – and given his new surname by the station manager, who found Zeiger “too Jewish.”
A year later, he moved to a larger station, where his duties were expanded from the usual style to being the host of a daily interview show broadcast from a local restaurant. He quickly proved to be just as adept at talking to waitresses and celebrities who started to walk by.
By the early 1960s, King had traveled to an even bigger resort in Miami, wrote a newspaper column, and had become a local celebrity himself.
At the same time, he was the victim of living great.
“It was important for me to come across as a ‘great man,’ ‘he wrote in his autobiography, which meant,’ I made a lot of money and gave it out generously.
He racked up debts and his first marriages broke (he was married eight times to seven women). He gambled, borrowed wildly and didn’t pay his taxes. He also got involved with a wacky financier in a scheme to fund an investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. But when King scavenged some of the money to pay his overdue taxes, his partner sued him for grand theft in 1971. The charges were dropped, but King’s reputation seemed ruined.
King lost his radio show and, for several years, struggled to find work. But by 1975, the scandal had exploded widely and a Miami resort gave it another chance. Regaining his local popularity, King was hired in 1978 to host the first nationwide radio show.
Hailing from Washington on the Mutual Network, “The Larry King Show” eventually hit over 300 stations and made King a national phenomenon.
A few years later, CNN founder Ted Turner offered King a spot on his young network. “Larry King Live” debuted on June 1, 1985 and became CNN’s highest-rated program. King’s initial salary of $ 100,000 per year eventually rose to over $ 7 million.
A habit of three packs of cigarettes a day led to a heart attack in 1987, but King’s five-fold bypass surgery didn’t slow it down.
During this time, he continued to prove that, in his words, “I’m not good at marriage, but I’m a great boyfriend.”
He was only 18 when he married high school girlfriend Freda Miller in 1952. The marriage lasted less than a year. In the following decades, he will marry Annette Kay, Alene Akins (twice), Mickey Sutfin, Sharon Lepore and Julie Alexander.
In 1997, he married Shawn Southwick, a country singer and actress 26 years his junior. They would file for divorce in 2010, cancel the filing, and then file for divorce again in 2019.
The couple had two sons, King’s fourth and fifth children, Chance Armstrong, born in 1999, and Cannon Edward, born in 2000. In 2020, King lost his two eldest children, Andy King and Chaia King, who died of problems. health unrelated to each other’s weeks.
He has had many other medical problems over the past decades, including more heart attacks and diagnoses of type 2 diabetes and lung cancer.
In early 2021, CNN reported that King had been hospitalized for more than a week with COVID-19.
During his setbacks, he continued to work until the late 1980s, taking online talk shows and infomercials as his appearances on CNN dwindled.
“Work,” King said once. “It’s the easiest thing I can do.”
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